


the shadows in the light

by golden_lily



Category: Class (TV 2016), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 03:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8474122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/golden_lily/pseuds/golden_lily
Summary: April touches him like she’s known him her entire life. Like they’re two kids on a playground, like it’s normal for just-friends to hold hands and spill secrets and maybe even kiss when the dead come back to life. And maybe it is, on whatever planet of folk-music and nightvisiting that she comes from.





	

It takes the group twenty minutes to bandage April’s arm, and a little longer for his heart rate to slow down.

It was sharp, mean, with loads more teeth than Ram’s ever seen (“It’s got double rows, like a shark,” Tanya whispers before it lunges down at her and scrapes its teeth down April’s arm instead). It was fucking _terrifying_ and April beats him to the punch, throwing herself in front of Tanya like it’s no big deal, like she could stand for another alien to take another piece of her.

He’s had it up to here with those things stealing parts of people.

He offers to walk her home and it takes another fifteen minutes for her to convince Charlie that she’s safe without Miss Quill’s protection. When they finally do start walking, they end up at his place. His parents aren’t home. Dad’s watching Mum speak at her fifth conference this month and won’t be home until after the big gala dinner, when there’ll be another trophy to clear a place for in the office.

“You’re sure this is alright, yeah?” He asks, watching April kick off her sneakers and then arrange them neatly in the hall closet.

She nods. “I’d rather not be alone right now.” He wonders how much of that statement is true, and how much of it stems from April’s bizarre ability to seemingly read his mind. He’s the one that’s been trembling like a volcano about to burst for the past hour, ever since he watched her nearly get her arm bitten off.

 _Just think. The two of you could’ve been matching,_ Miss Quill said as Tanya poured hydrogen peroxide over April’s battle scar. Ram’s never come closer to saying fuck it all, and lunging at a who-knows-what-kind-of-alien who could absolutely kill him.

April follows him upstairs quietly, sliding her hand through his so they’re standing palm-to-palm.

He’s never known anyone quite like her, who touches him like she’s afraid he’ll disappear if she can’t feel him right next to her. With Rachel, touch was a negotiated space. It was a quick brush of the lips against the cheek, a fumbled first kiss, his hand making the first move to slide under her top, her fingers hesitating before tracing comforting lines down the skin of his back. It all followed the classic teenage protocol.

April touches him like she’s known him her entire life. Like they’re two kids on a playground, like it’s normal for just-friends to hold hands and spill secrets and maybe even kiss when the dead come back to life. And maybe it is, on whatever planet of folk-music and nightvisiting that she comes from.

But he can’t even make fun of her for it, because the truth is it feels nice to have someone reach out and hold him, and it feels nicer that that person is April.

They lay on his bed, hands intertwined until he moves his up to gently cup the bandage on her forearm. “Does it hurt?”

“Terribly.” His eyes meet hers, and it’s not two seconds before she’s giggling in a distinctly April way, all softness and bravado. “No, not too much. Miss Quill gave me some sort of painkiller before we left.”

That should be a comfort, but he can’t help his fingers from ghosting over the bandage again. For all they know about the things that come crawling through the bunghole of time, April could’ve been bitter by some venomous shark-monster, and the poison could be creeping through her veins right now.

“Hey.” She catches his hand with hers. “I’ve had much worse.” She brings his hand up to her chin, where he can trace a bumpy scar right below the bone. “I was ten, and playing hopscotch with some kids while Mum was in physio. I may have overshot my jump a teensy bit.”

Ram laughs at that. It’s all too easy to picture a smaller April, clumsy as she is now, limbs flaying desperately as she leaps before she looks.

“Eight stitches.” There’s a note of pride in her voice, and her chin juts out, daring him to one-up her. Always game, he points to his eye.

“Oh yeah? This had to be stapled shut,” he challenges. She shifts up closer to him.

He can almost feel her eyes tracing the faint line below his left eyebrow. “What happened?”

“Ran head-on to a goalpost. Would’ve lost a tooth if I wasn’t wearing a mouthguard.” He remembers being twelve and on the verge of tears at the hospital, his mum holding his hand while Dad lectures him on proper safety protocol. “It was ugly. One of my teammates threw up because it was bleeding so bad.”

April laughs at this. “And let me guess, you never let him live it down.”

“You kidding? One of the guys got him a ‘Pukey Pat’ T-shirt for his birthday a couple years ago.”

Now they’re both laughing, and it feels like this could be any regular day, like the bunghole of time and space hasn’t just opened up in their school and rained shit down on their lives. Except that on any regular day, Ram would’ve never in a million years thought he’d have April Maclean up in his bedroom.

She brings her hand up between them, waving her right palm in his face, where he can barely see a faint white line down one of her fingers. “Year Five. I was watching the X-Factor finale and helping Mum with supper.”

That’s so much like the April he thought he knew before this whole bunghole of time fiasco that he can’t help but chuckle again. “Big Jedward fan, were you?”

She sniffs, but before she can snatch her hand back he laces their fingers back together. That earns him a grin. “Olly Murs, actually.”

Keeping their hands together, he opens his mouth wide, like he’s at the dentist. “Year Ten. Got my tonsils out.”

April doesn’t crane away or frown in disgust; instead, she leans forward. “Weird.”

“Can you see the scars?”

“Yeah. They’re so… white.”

Ram nods, closing his mouth. “I freaked out so bad before the surgery, they had to shoot me with some sort of tranquilizer.”

“No!” She exclaims, eyes wide.

“It’s true. But don’t you dare tell anyone about that. Tanya would never let it go.”

April does this weird sort of gesture that he’s only seen on American telly. “Cross my heart.”

There’s quiet then, the kind that’s so sudden that Ram knows something important’s just popped into her head, and so he waits for her to sort through it. After a few seconds, she pitches her head forward, letting go of his fingers to hold her hair away from the back of her neck. “See that?”

He doesn’t at first, but as he moves closer the puzzle pieces fall into place, and he can see small scars discolouring the back of her neck. They’re almost geometric. “Yeah?”

She whips her head back up, looking at him with those clear blue eyes again. “When I was eight, I was half-bald for awhile because those marks. They were these big sort of cuts. It was the accident – there was lots of glass, and some of it got into my hair and in my scalp and my neck…”

He waits for her to finish, gaze never leaving her face.

She swallows. “It was awful. Took them hours to get it all out, and they had to shave bits and pieces of my hair to clean the cuts and stitch them up. I looked like a total freak.”

Silence falls again and this time, Ram knows it’s alright for him to break it because now April’s looking down, like she’s got something to be embarrassed about, like it’s her fault her dad’s an absolute tosser.

“Bet you didn’t. Bet you looked like a mini Furiosa from that Mad Max film.”

“What?” She mutters – at least, that’s what he thinks she mutters.

“You haven’t seen Mad Max? Seriously, April?” He’s hoping for some sort of banter here, bring things back to the planet where the April he knows never lets anything shake her, but she’s still looking down and so he sighs. “Charlize Theron’s got a shaved head in it and she looks totally fit.” He smoothes a hand down her hair. “You’ve totally got the head shape for it.”

She looks up again, turning so that his hand moves to rest on her cheek. After a moment of silence, where she just watches him like he’s some sort of new species, she dissolves into soft laughter. “Thanks. I think.”

“You’re very welcome.”

There’s still a bit of tension here, like there was earlier when all he could think of is her arm and poison and Tanya and April standing bulls-eye in front of an alien. He hates it.

But he’s not stupid enough to think that he’ll be able to just pretend it away, and so after’s a minute’s hesitation he rolls up his pant leg. “Tit for tat, this is.”

He’s having a hard time looking at her now, because he’s just exposed something that he can’t even bear to look at in the mirror, let alone have anybody else see. The new leg might have saved his life, but it’s undeniably, inextricably alien, and for all the terror those creatures have brought to their lives, he hates that he’s tied to one of them.

He’s got his eyes trained on the duvet and notices a loose thread that he’ll tug out later when he feels April near. “Is it okay if I…?” Ram looks up just an increment to see her hand hovering above his sort-of prosthetic and slowly nods, his throat suddenly dry.

He braces himself. April’s the second person ever to touch the alien-appendage, and she doesn’t even have to pretend it’s okay, the way his dad did. She can say or do whatever she wants, and he’s totally at her mercy.

She starts at the bottom, tracing her fingers lightly across the sinew, or muscle, or whatever the hell this thing is made of. She grazes his calf next and takes a moment to lean in closer to take a look the limb’s semi-transparent skin. “Wow,” he catches her whisper, but she doesn’t take her fingers off of him, or freak out, or anything like that.

Instead, she runs her hand up to the line that marks the amputation and Ram hisses. She frowns. “Does it still hurt?”

He takes a beat to answer. “No. Yes. It’s like…” He takes another beat, trying to verbalize something his dad understood without asking. “That phantom limb thing. I know my leg’s not there anymore, but sometimes I can feel it being cut off all over again.”

She nods like she understands. “Mum had something like that after the accident. Said she could still feel her legs even though the doctors knew it was impossible. Physio really helped.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not like I can visit a physio clinic and show them this thing.” The words come out sharper than he means and immediately, he cringes.

But April’s not made of glass, as she so proudly states, like skin isn’t just as fragile, and her forehead furrows. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Her hand, which has been resting on his knee, starts moving in a slow, comforting pattern.

He nods. “It’s fine.”

She’s still staring at him with that furrowed brow, like he’s the puzzle here when they both know everything Ram thinks and feels is permanently etched on his face, and reaches forward to grab his hand in hers.

“Miss Quill was wrong, earlier, you know. We’re already matching.” She brings his hand up to her chest and presses it to her sternum. He can feel the thump-thump of her half-heart, beating quick against the palm of his hand, and wonders if it’s beating so fast because she shares her heart with an alien warlord, or because his hand is basically on her chest.

Honestly, he’s not sure which is weirder.

(Probably the fact that he’s practically feeling up April Maclean, let’s be honest here.)

“That’s fucked,” he says, because it’s all he can think, and April laughs like he’s just told the joke of the century.

“Isn’t it?”

He starts laughing with her. Their lives are complete catastrophes and for once, it feels better to laugh about it than to cry.

Once they sober up, she gets that serious look on her face again. “I’m not sure if I’ve told you since that night, but I’m really, really sorry about Rachel.” She pauses. “She was really nice.”

Ram freezes and once again spouts out the first thing that comes to mind. “April, don’t take this the wrong way… but maybe next time, save the dead girlfriend talk till my hand isn’t on your tit.”

They both look down to where he can still feel her heartbeat and, almost on the count of three, dissolve into more laughter. This time, it’s almost hysterical, and it’s not long until they’re both wiping tears out of their eyes.

When he catches his breath, he’s aching to say something else. “She was, wasn’t she? Nice.”

April nods. “She was. We were partners once, for a maths project, and she’s the only partner I’ve ever had that didn’t leave me to do all the work.” She smiles. “She had great handwriting.”

That comment is something only _April_ would say about a dead girl, and Ram has to bite back more laughter. “She did.” Silence falls between them again.

“I know you and Tanya have your thing, and she gets it much better than I do, but my door’s always open if you need me.” She frowns. “Not literally. I do have a curfew on school nights. But I also have unlimited calls on my phone plan.”

He feels oddly caught off-guard by all of this, by April bring up Rachel. By his new _whatever_ talking about his last girlfriend.  “Okay. I’ll remember that.”

“Okay.”

And though it feels like there’s a million things left unsaid between them, like they’ve barely scratched the surface of the Rachel of it all, not the mention the technicalities of sharing one’s heart with an alien warlord and living with a monster’s leg, the chaos of the day hits Ram and he yawns.

“I’m knackered.”            

“Oh. Right.” April makes to get up, but his arm shoots out and grabs her wrist before she can leave the bed.

He tugs her by the arm until she’s next to him again and they’re laying face to face on top of his duvet. “That wasn’t an invitation to leave.”

“Oh,” she whispers again, all confusion and naiveté, and it strikes Ram for this first time that she really doesn’t have the any sort of experience with this whole saving-the-world-and-maybe-dating-while-doing-so thing. That that first kiss was, in all likelihood, a fluke, and April doesn’t have any better idea of what she’s doing than he does.

And no matter how much he wants it, it feels strange to go in for the second kiss right now, with April hurt and Rachel’s name floating like a ghost between them, and it feels strangely important to Ram to let it happen in another, better day. He screws his eyes shut. “Take a nap with me.”

“What?” He doesn’t need to look at April to catch the bemusement in her tone.

“You heard me. I hate sleeping alone.” He can’t keep from grinning at that. He can almost hear her roll her eyes.

“You’re something else.”

“I really am.”

After a few seconds, he feels April nestle herself against the pillows next to him. She whispers again, “Like I said, I’ve got a curfew. I’m not staying long.”

“Sure,” he whispers back, grinning again.

Before he falls asleep, he reaches out and takes her hand, linking it with his.

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably non-canon compliant after 1x04, since it was written right after 1x03 as an extended scene with Ram and April adapting to the sudden shift in their relationship. 
> 
> I love the idea of Ram being the only one of the gang to have a stable, two-parent household, and also the idea of his mom being this genius geneticist that him and his dad cheer on, so any mentions of his parents link to that idea, which also isn't canon at all (but I wish it was).


End file.
